Page:Scottishartrevie01unse.djvu/158

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128
THE SCOTTISH ART REVIEW

to 1532, and was, perhaps, next to Bishop Elphinstone, the most illustrious occupant of that See.

The last possessor of the See of St. Kentigern was James Beaton, the second of the name, who was consecrated at Rome on 2Sth August 1552. Five years after his promotion he and another bishop and six other persons were commissioned by the Estates of Scotland to go to France as witnesses of the espousals of Queen Mary with the Dauphin. The Archbishop was also present at the solemnisation of the marriage, on 24th April 1558, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. In August 1549 the celebrated Convention of Clergy had been held at Linlithgow. In the November follow- ing a Provincial Council was held in Edinburgh, and the Vicar-General of Glasgow attended it, as the See was then vacant. Another Provincial Council took place in 1559, which lasted from 1st March to 10th April. The Archbishop of Glasgow took part in it ; and with it ended the last Council of the old Scottish Church.

It is no part of this slight sketch to travel beyond the year 1560, or to go into those causes that led to the national change of religion. But one may say that few dioceses in Christendom have had a more glorious or edifying existence of fully one thousand years than Glasgows ancient See. It began with Kentigern, and ends with Aixhbishop Beaton Seciindo, who in 1560 retired to France. He was appointed ambassador for his sovereign at the Court of France; was restored to a portion of the temporality of his See in 1600, and died at the age of eighty-six, on 25th April 1603.

The names of Kentigern, Jocelin, Bondington, Wishart, Cameron, Turnbull, Blackader, Dunbar, and James Beaton will always be household words in the West of Scotland. Of each of these may we say : ' Many shall praise his wisdom, and it shall never be forgotten. The memory of him sliall not depart away, and his name shall be in request from generation to generation. — Ecclus. xxxix. 12, 13.

Charles, Archhishop of Glasgoio.

ROME AND THE MIDDLE AGES.

IT is a commonplace that Rome took her art by sheer annexation from Greece; that Roman art is Greek art plagiarised, but with the fine edge blunted, the delicate handling lost. Like many commonplaces, however, this judgment, if sweeping, is shallow, and, though accepted so long as to be ' the catholic faith,' is still not exempt from reversion. In sculpture it may be true, but is certainly not the whole truth; of painting we know too little to form a judgment ; but in architecture it is for the most part nonsense. Sr. Velazquez, Professor of the History of Architecture at the Madrid School of Fine Arts, has been, I believe, the first directly to challenge the old accepted creed ; nor to any who know Spain will it come as a surprise that to tiiat land we should owe a new idea, or the new handling of an old one. To notes of Sr. Velazquez's lectures the following paper is largely due, lectures delivered unwritten in true Spanish fashion, and lavished with Spanish prodigality on a scanty audience without thought of garnering for publication. In architecture the case against Rome rests chiefly on her temples. As long as Rome pre- served her simple primitive faith, such temples as she had seem to have been adapted from Etruscan models. Towards the close of the third century B.C., Greek ideas had filtered in, and were rapidly displacing the old national creed ; during the second century the transformation in intellectual Rome was complete, and her worship was an im- portation. The humbler classes, doubtless, still clung to the old, simpler faith, but in architecture the humbler classes do not count ; they have no monuments in marble. It is, therefore, little wonder if, in importing her religion, Rome borrowed also the temples that enshrined it ; but she copied them less slavishly than is generally supposed, and the peri- stylar arrangement, almost essential in Greece, was probably an exception in Rome; the temple of Vesta never came from the shores of the iEgean ; the temple of Mars Ultor of the Augustan age, one of the oldest of which any fragments remain, is be- lieved to liave had an apse ; and the Roman temples seem to have nearly always been more or less Etruscan in plan, a portico in front of one or more cells side by side. Of this the present portico of the Pantheon, originally, it is probable, a temple by itself, is a typical, and the finest, instance. But whereas in Greece architecture, if not synony- mous with ' temples,' at any rate found in them its highest perfection, the temples of Rome are but an insignificant portion of her architectm-e, and its least national expression. The temple is not its type. It is false, moreover, to take a single element, like